It’s official!!
The training I went through last weekend was one of the most intense and yet wonderfully moving experiences I have had in the longest time. I am talking about the bereavement facilitator training I mentioned in my last post. That 8 hours a day, two day training means I am now officially certified (no, I didn’t say certifiable:) to facilitate a bereavement group. I’m actually embarrassed to admit it but that was my very first experience with group. I have certainly been in therapy, but in one-on-one private sessions and now, I can’t say enough positives about group. The two days were filled with massive armloads of sharing, caring, compassion, support and laughter through tears; one of my favorite emotions (as Dolly Parton said in “Steel Magnolias”). There were ten of us in the class and two facilitators. Out of that group there were four of us who had lost a child. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t alone in my grief. There was a husband and wife in the group who lost their 21 year old daughter in a car accident; a mom who came home one day to find her only child had hung herself at age 14; another mom whose only son told her one afternoon that he would be back soon as he left to go on a run with his friends, but ended up collapsing and dying of heat stroke; and then of course Ashley’s story. There was a woman who lost her husband and shortly thereafter her house burned to the ground taking everything she had with it. Another young woman spent three months in Italy helping her mother in her final days. Still another 3 women worked as counselors or therapists with low-income clients and finally one woman whose story touched us all. Let’s call her Joan. She is an RN and works for an agency that serves the homeless and tries to get them back on their feet. One day a woman came to her whose teen aged daughter had been taken away from her and she was glad. She said her daughter was too much trouble and she was glad her daughter was gone. When Joan said she was sure she didn’t really mean that her reply was certain that she did….she was dead to her now she swore. Then Joan said to the woman in a soft and loving voice, “Well, I realize that children and our relationship with them can sometimes be difficult, so why don’t I look in on your daughter and make sure she’s safe for awhile and why don’t I love her for you until you feel like you can again.” Well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place after that.
I sure hope that Heaven has someone like Joan who wraps our children in their arms as soon as they get there and promises them that they will look after them and love them until we can be there with them to do it again. Don’t you?
